Ridgeline welcome wagon

Tuesday

Last Saturday morning, I’d just finished a trip up and down Spencer Butte’s north slope when there she was: a young woman getting out of a taxicab at the 52nd and Willamette Trailhead.

I’ve seen some delightfully strange things on Spencer Butte over the years: a man hiking in a suit and tie, a group of women taking yoga mats to the top, a mail carrier hiking the trail on his lunch hour.

But I’d never seen a hiker arrive by cab.

“I was going to take mass transit,” Judea Franck told me, “but it was too complicated and would have taken at least 90 minutes.”

Franck was, I learned, 31 and from “the other Portland” — Maine — although in recent years she has lived in Fort Collins, Colo., where she’s a fundraiser for Colorado State University.

She’d heard lots about Oregon but never gotten closer than San Francisco. So she decided to check it out.

When she’d asked for a quintessential-things-to-do list, someone had mentioned hiking to the top of the 2,062-foot butte to get a visual perspective on the place.

And so, as I said, there she was, in hiking garb.

“I want to be the SLUG Queen someday,” she told me two days later, after agreeing to share her impressions of Eugene with me. “I can’t believe the fabulous size of your slugs. One went right across the trail.

“It was beautiful.”

Yep, after her three-day visit, Franck was oozing praise for Eugene. But first, I asked her to share what she expected of Oregon before she arrived.

“I knew of the university’s reputation, that great things were happening in science, humanities, the social sciences, journalism. That’s what first attracted me.

“Beyond that, I knew the Pacific Northwest was lush, rainy and green — and also a bit dangerous and with an ‘adventure-bound’ landscape. That it had a ‘raw-er’ edge to it than other places.

“My husband and I are adventurous by nature, and so we like a landscape and community that are brought together by some of the beauty and challenges you find in the natural world: oceans and mountains, the volcanic history, the controversy, the northern spotted owl, how you make complicated choices.

“It’s a community that intrigues us.”

Franck went on a real estate tour, intrigued by how politely resistant the agent was to show favoritism to any particular neighborhood.

She had the woman stop so she could see Pre’s Rock.

“Anyone who’s aspired to be an athlete knows of Steve Prefontaine’s journey as an athlete and icon and person, and what he meant to America,” says Franck, herself an equestrian with Olympic hopes.

She walked the banks of the Willamette River, checked out Hayward Field, stayed at the Excelsior Inn (“fabulous”) and ate, among other places, at the new Falling Sky Brewery.

“I loved the communal-style seating,” she says.

She talked “winter” with folks, about how the rain provides time for “introspection” because of people being gently forced indoors whereas “in Colorado, it’s sunny 360 days a year.”

But it was the hike up Spencer Butte where she found the most insight. Not just regarding place, but people.

“Eugene is a little more bohemian and more authentic and closer to nature than I’m used to,” she says. “In Fort Collins, you’d need a 30- to 35-minute drive up Poudre Canyon to get to something like this.”

Between the time she got into the cab and returned to the trailhead after going to the top, she had met a nosy columnist, four graduate students who plan to live at the Aprovecho sustainable community in the forests near Cottage Grove and a few “ü ber-athletes who came by like a jet stream,” but each still taking time to say hello.

“It was like seeing Sasquatch suddenly rise out of the forest,” Franck says, “but they were so welcoming.”

Franck talked with a fellow hiker, Noreen Dunnells, chief executive at United Way of Lane County.

“Her husband saved me, pointing out that I was rubbing in poison oak.”

She saw the slug, of course. And she talked to a cabbie who was still a tad disgruntled about the demise of the timber industry.

“I asked him what he liked best about this place,” she says. “He told me two things: his family being here and the Ducks. Not just the sports teams, the university.”

She asked me the same question. What did I like best about Eugene?

“That it’s big enough to offer a first-class university, an airport and a world-class Bach festival, but small enough so that, unlike where I used to live near Seattle, you don’t have to search for a parking spot at Fred Meyer at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.

“I like the simplicity of this place, the access to mountains and coast. I like that I can be on a trail like this in 15 minutes — and I live on the other side of town.”

As our chat Monday came to an end, I couldn’t resist.

“So,” I asked, “did you get poison oak?”

Franck did not, even if she’s itching to return to Eugene on a permanent basis.

“I’m not easily charmed,” she says. “And I love my current community. But it was more wonderful than I could have imagined.”

And had she taken a cab back the Excelsior?

“Oh, no,” she says. “I hitched a ride with the United Way woman and her husband.”

Follow Welch on Twitter @bob_welch. He can be reached at 541-338-2354 or e-mail bob.welch@registerguard.com.

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